s indeed a singular spectacle! In 1803 he had been
sent to the Senate of the United States by Federalists as a Federalist;
in 1808 he had abjured them and they had repudiated him; in 1809, as
we are soon to see, he received a foreign appointment from the
Republican President Madison, and was confirmed by a Republican
Senate. Many of Mr. Adams's acts, many of his traits, have been
harshly criticised, but for no act that he ever did or ever was
charged with doing has he been so harshly assailed as for this (p. 058)
journey from one camp to the other. The gentlemen of wealth, position,
and influence in Eastern Massachusetts, almost to a man, turned
against him with virulence; many of their descendants still cherish
the ancestral prejudice; and it may yet be a long while before the
last mutterings of this deep-rooted antipathy die away. But that they
will die away in time cannot be doubted. Praise will succeed to blame.
Truth must prevail in a case where such abundant evidence is
accessible; and the truth is that Mr. Adams's conduct was not ignoble,
mean, and traitorous, but honorable, courageous, and disinterested.
Those who singled him out for assault, though deaf to his arguments,
might even then have reflected that within a few years a large
proportion of the whole nation had changed in their opinions as he had
now at last changed in his, so that the party which under Washington
hardly had an existence and under John Adams was not, until the last
moment, seriously feared, now showed an enormous majority throughout
the whole country. Even in Massachusetts, the intrenched camp of the
Federalists, one half of the population were now Republicans. But that
change of political sentiment which in the individual voter is often
admired as evidence of independent thought is stigmatized in (p. 059)
those more prominent in politics as tergiversation and apostasy.

It may be admitted that there are sound reasons for holding party
leaders to a more rigid allegiance to party policy than is expected of
the rank and file; yet certainly, at those periods when substantially
new measures and new doctrines come to the front, the old party names
lose whatever sacredness may at other times be in them, and the
political fellowships of the past may properly be reformed. Novel
problems cannot always find old comrades still united in opinions.
Precisely such was the case with John Quincy Adams and the Federalists.
The earlier Federalist